Southern Baptists

Fired National Security Council staff member Oliver L. North, who fell from grace as the Iran-Contra scandal unfolded, was hailed as a prophet with honor Monday by thousands of flag-waving Southern Baptists. Standing Patton-like against a backdrop of a 40-by-60-foot American flag, North received a series of standing ovations as he compared his own travails to the crossing of the Red Sea.

The Southern Baptist Convention -- the nation's largest Protestant group -- has reached a membership of 16.2 million, an all-time high, the denomination has announced. In addition to the 1.2% growth in membership, the denomination also reported increases in local congregations (42,775) and missions (5,439). However, there were slight declines in annual baptisms (394,893) and Sunday School enrollment (8,174,493). Total financial receipts increased by 6.4% to $9.5 billion.

The Rev. Jess Moody, pastor of the nearly completed $15-million Shepherd of the Hills Church in Chatsworth, has told a Southern Baptist news agency that he agreed to be nominated for the presidency of that denomination in a last-ditch effort at reconciliation between victorious fundamentalist leaders and moderates who have drifted away.

The 22-member Peace Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, buoyed by the reelection of a conservative as its president, released a report affirming beliefs in the authority of the Bible. The committee, whose report will represent the denomination of 14.6 million Southern Baptists, said this week that biblical accounts of the miraculous and the supernatural are truthful as given by God and recorded by biblical writers.

The Southern Baptist Convention, born of a North-South split over slavery, on Tuesday overwhelmingly passed a resolution lamenting its pro-slave-owner roots and repenting for lingering racism. The resolution was approved by a show of hands at the denomination's annual meeting in Atlanta, a gathering of nearly 15,000 voting clergy and lay people.

The president of the Southern Baptists' extensive radio and television operation resigned this week as the agency's board of trustees was considering two new offers to buy the denomination's cable television network. Baptist Press reported that the Rev. Jimmy Allen, president of the denomination's Radio-Television Commission since January, 1980, announced that he will become chief executive of one of the companies that has made an offer to buy the network, if the offer is accepted.

Southern Baptists have banished two congregations for accepting homosexuals and set in motion a precedent-setting change in bylaws to exclude other churches that do the same. The Southern Baptist Convention, attended by about 18,000 members, voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to expel two North Carolina congregations: the Pullen Memorial Church in Raleigh, which blessed a union of two homosexual men, and the Binkley Memorial Church in Chapel Hill, which ordained a homosexual to preach.

A fundamentalist pastor was elected president of the Southern Baptists by only a 2% margin this week, but that narrow victory did not seem to slow the 10-year, ever-more-conservative trend of the large denomination. Only a day after the election of the Rev. Jerry Vines of Jacksonville, Fla., a resolution was passed to redefine a cherished Baptist doctrine by promoting the increased authority of pastors and restricting church members' rights in interpreting Scripture.

Baptist moderates who attended last week's convention of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship live a schizophrenic existence--one foot planted in the conservative-controlled Southern Baptist Convention and the other in their own moderate fellowship. Now, impatient rumblings are building among some moderates who want to form their own denomination.

June 15, 1991 | LOUIS MOORE, Louis Moore serves on the staff of the Southern Baptist Christian Life Commission in Nashville, Tenn., and speaks as an official of the church. Moore was religion editor of the Houston Chronicle from 1972 to 1986 and was president of the Religion Newswriters Assn. 1984-86. and

After 12 years of rancor and heated dissent, the smoke of political gunfire is lifting from the 15-million-member Southern Baptist Convention, making it possible to discern the outline of what the nation's largest non-Catholic religious body will be like in the years to come.